Somehow the winter has sped by, but reflections of 2022 still are very much present so I thought it would never be too late to sit down, gather my thoughts, gather key projects and personal moments of development to share, both with myself and with you. What a year it was. Following Covid, we kicked off January 2022 with a relaxing of rules and coming back to some form of a normal performance style and social rhythm. Normal is a big word to use- I’m not sure if we can ever return to what was before. Being with people and collaborating and the opportunities for residencies and travel felt ever more special, yet also came with its challenges- movement, speed, and over-stimulation that we had been out of practice of. But even so, I am ever grateful for the many inspiring and special moments throughout the year- from attending friends’ concerts to my own performances, resuming group sports and cycling through incredible London skies, growing my string duo and having so many opportunities to grow my creative practice. Below I share some of the highlights.
Sinfonia Viva Commission- Becoming One and Drifting Tides
One of the key projects I had last year was writing two orchestral pieces for Sinfonia Viva. It was an absolute honour to be commissioned to compose in celebration of their 40th Anniversary and a wonderful way to grow my solo compositional skills, as I had to date never written for large ensemble or full orchestra.
Becoming One
Encounters, communicating, connecting. INNER SELF. separating, joining. SILENCE. turbulence, nature and environment. TRANSFORMATION.
Written in collaboration with Sing Viva, 'Becoming One' takes breath in all its meanings as the starting point for both the lyrics and the music. Loosely drawing on the Indian raga Charukeshi, the piece is a reflection and celebration of the relationship between individual and the collective.
The process of writing it really spoke to me and my ideal way of working, given its co-creative nature. I had the chance to workshop my ideas and introduce the concept of Breath to Sing Viva, Sinfonia Viva’s community carers choir. Leading various musical processes with a lyric brainstorming segment, we ended up with a poignant set of words that I subsequently took as seeds t0 grow the rest of the piece. As I developed parts of the piece, we met on Zoom to try out what I had written and write more. What I liked about this way of working is that I had tangible material to work with that had come from others and also they were able to find some sense of ownership and relatability with the piece that I was writing.
The piece was performed by Sing Viva, String Orchestra and percussion and premiered in May at Derby Cathedral.
Along with ‘Becoming One’, I composed another piece called ‘Drifting Tides’ for full orchestra, which was to be performed as a part of a summer festival in Derby and New Year’s Eve. Very exciting indeed and quite celebratory. Following from the theme of breath, I took the theme of oceans and preservation of nature as the concept. The piece explores inner connection and mankind’s relationship to nature – capturing the ebb and flow of the tide, represented through beautiful melody and the interplay between instruments depicting the mysteriousness of the sea and the creatures below.
Of course, with music, much of concept the is demonstrated in an abstract way. The opening melody that is heard on brass was a tune that I wrote at the beginning of the pandemic and constantly returned to whenever I picked up my violin, It felt an appropriate time to find a larger melodic and harmonic setting for such a melody. In a way, as all creative processes go, the piece wrote itself. One step at a time and slowly it emerged. Of course, there were new challenges for me. Finding the balance between parts, knowing how to write for brass, winds, strings and percussion (as well as harp and piano!) With so many players and parts, finding ways to double lines, strike a balance between simplicity and interest can be difficult. With so many different parts, the music can get dense without space to actually hear the intricacy. I had a mentoring session with Johannes Beraeur, an outstanding composer in Austria, which helped me look at the nuances to orchestration and consider how to sharpen and strengthen the parts that I had written. It is a mega-skill in itself to translate music to an orchestra, and this was only about 7 minutes long!
Hats off to all the incredible composers out there who regularly write for orchestra. As a performer, I am well aware of the magnificence of so many works, but actually being behind the scenes in the compositional process gave me others kinds of insight and more humility.
The piece explores inner connection and mankind’s relationship to nature – capturing the ebb and flow of the tide, represented through beautiful melody and the interplay between instruments depicting the mysteriousness of the sea and the creatures below.
Balladeste
Balladeste really surged forward in 2022, following the release of our second album Beyond Breath in September 2021. We also were thrilled to receive Arts Council of England idea, which really allowed us to see through some of our creative ideas and invest more time into our duo development.
In February last year, we spent a week at the beautiful Hawkwod College in Stroud with 4 other wonderful string players (Laura Moody cellist, Flora Curzon, violin, Mandel duo- Misha Law viola and Emily Hall, violin) working on musical improvisation and arranging our music in an embodied way. Tara and I have long dreamed of having our music performed by an extended female ensemble and this was the first opportunity to trial our vision. Supported by Arts Council England, we were able to invite four versatile performer-composers to explore our musical ideas, in the gorgeous countryside setting. We started each morning with a collective yoga inspired warm up, scales and technique practice which organically led to a free improvisation. In the afternoon, we worked through selected pieces of ours, a combination of using backbone scores that I had prepared beforehand and jamming out and workshopping ideas. We ended up with some stunning arrangements and are hoping to bring this to the stage later this year.
Notating our music has been an ongoing project, not only to have documentation of our violin and cello pieces for other musicians to be able to read along with the recordings, but also to plant the seed for future larger arrangements for string orchestra. We have some exciting potential collaborations with string orchestras on the horizon and the collection of pieces is nearly complete and ready to publish. Cannot wait to put it out into the world, alongside our albums. It is a different type of creative work for us, given that our composing is very much embodied. The nitty-grittiness of it can be taxing, but it has been rewarding to embark on this challenge.
Alongside our extended strings and notation project, we continued to tour and perform around the UK, some of the highlights being Dartington Concert Hall, The Old Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol to a really vibrant and enthusiastic audience, Festival of the New @ Snape Maltings testing out our new improv set, and a collaboration with Tullis Runnie, an electronic musician in Fat Tuesday Festival in Hastings.
We also released a rework EP in the summer, an interesting take on our music by four outstanding contemporary composers: Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres, Anna Phoebe, The Vernon Spring, Midori Hirano. Alongside the EP, we made a film to an original track with amazing choreographer Vidya Patel and fantastic filmmaker, Greta Zabulyte. They were wonderful collaborators and a fabulous team.
Throughout the year, the two of us focused much of our playing on improvisation. We usually improvise in order to compose our tracks, but having built a duo language over the course of our long-term collaboration, we decided to spend time honing in the art of improvising in order to bring it into live performance in and of itself. This culminated in the recording of our next album as a part of Britten Pears Artist Residency, where we were joined by long-time friend and recording engineer Alex Bonney to create an improv album.
It has been very exciting to see our duo project blossom- not only seeing some of our creative ideas come to life but also seeing digital engagement and the love and support of more listeners and fans. As much as Spotify and similar platforms can be problematic, it has become the way people discover our music and a way to disseminate our music more widely. We are grateful to be heard.
Gigs with Soumik Datta and friends
Soumik Datta, a wonderful sarod player based in London and dear friend if mine, brought a group of beauitiful musicians together to perform new music that bridges his Indian Classical background with his modern influences. It was super special to reconnect to an old friend and be in an intimate musical ensemble, with Aref on tabla and Rosie on keys. Another close friend Camilo did the sound. I loved the small hook melodies and the freedom to improvise and express my own voice whilst in dialogue with Soumik on sarod and the foundational instruments. We performed at Snape Maltings on Serious Jazz’s Dome Stage, did an intimate summer garden home concert, and also played for Dishoom’s celebration of 75 years of Partition in Granary Square, King’s Cross. This musical experience was actually the spark of my travels to India. Soumik encouraged me to get in touch with his teacher, Prattyush Banerjee, and I sincerely wanted to return to a place that I love so much to develop my creative practice and also to experinece a new city and new teacher. More on my India travels and studies below.
Yoga Retreat (Daryn’s Yoga Shala)
I was thrilled to co-lead my first yoga retreat alongside my dear friend and KYM teacher training classmate Daryn Wober. Daryn arranged for the retreat to be held at a beautiful centre in Norwich, the West Lexham Retreat Centre, and we traveled there for 4 days during the hot and sunny summer days to immerse ourselves in the practice of yoga, in all of its essence! The gorgeous setting was definitely conducive to a calm and peace that is hard to attain in the city, plus the nourishing food and choice to be in silence and without phones or other external resources outside of scheduled discussion.
We started each day with an early morning practice and continued into sessions of chanting and philosophy. The afternoon was spacious, a chance to be in nature. We gathered again for evening practice plus chanting/kirtan by me with voice and harmonium. I enjoyed deepening my practice through the act of teaching and sharing my humble knowledge on chant, sound, and mantra. I look forward to leading the retreat again in 2023.
Nine Songs
A new experience to be in a 5 weeks straight RnD- the luxury to have the time to develop a new production based on an ancient Chinese Text called Nine Songs. Rui Fu, singer and researcher, brought the concept, and Farooq Chaudury, renowned producer of the Akram Khan Company, is the artistic director. But also realising that it never is enough time when there is time! With the seeds they brought, we developed the show and music in collaboration and also with the input of composer Jocelyn Pook. It was a challenging experience- we did not know each other, had never worked together before, and also had language barriers. Given my own long-standing experience in collaborating with musicians across cultures, I felt like I was able to help to get the process rolling and flowing in the beginning.
The first show was premiered in Saudi Arabia, Alula and was quite the experience. It not only broke many of our preconceived notions and assumptions about Saudi, but even more was just an incredible landscape to be working in. The show itself was in the desert, and the Royal Commission of Alula, sponsoring the show, brought a large tech team and incredible resources to make the show happen in the middle of nowhere- generators, a stage, and manpower. We worked quite hard to get the show into a state of performance for an elite and local audience, sometimes staying out on the stage til 12/1 AM even when the temperature had dropped. The huge precipices and red mountains surrounding were very epic and sparked a real sense of the vastness of nature and the humility we as humans can have. See poems that i wrote during our time below.
In January 2023, went to Newcastle to work at Dance City Theatre to tweak and re-adapt the show for indoor theatre with sound and lighting. It was wonderful to have the space between the Saudi shows and the new year to digest the material and get a distance from the work to see what needed to be reworked and fine-tuned. The process flowed much better in this second stage and we had a beautiful performance at the end of the 10 days. It is still a work in progress, but with this fantastic team of musicians and artists, it definitely has potential. It will be touring to some far-reaching locations in the autumn of 2023.
Dec adventure + Studying in Kolkata with Prattyush-da
My development activity supported by Help Musicians UK- studying Hindustani music with Prattyush Banerjee, sarod maestro, in Kolkata, India- was everything I could have hoped for and more. I stayed in a recommended place and location near my teacher's home, and traveled to his home every other day for class.
The rigour of my craft and daily practice routine is something that has been hard to maintain amongst the varied responsibilities that professional musical life demands. With the many hats that a professional artist must wear, i.e. performing, composing, workshops, administrative, tour managing, it can be hard to get into a flow when one finally has time to practice and create. My sole focus for my study period in Kolkata was to practice violin and work on the new tools that I would acquire from my mentor. In addition, I did not have to worry about cooking, cleaning or have a social schedule or tourist agenda, which provided the space to get into a flow over the course of the four weeks.
Kolkata Sunset from the Rabindro Saravar Lake
Prattyush-da (a respectful term for brother) was extremely systematic and organised in his teaching, which is often hard to find in teachers of Indian music because of the nature of the musical system. Because I have already attained a level of musicianship and am an advanced player with a lot of exposure to the Indian music system, we were able to progress quite rapidly. He did a phenomenal job of clearly transmitting the nuts and bolts and creative tools of the style whilst leaving the onus on me to establish the way to work with them and apply them to my practice as well as composition. This challenged me and gave me the space to be creative even within the course of development and know what the longer term practice would demand, beyond my India stay and training.
Before classes, I would sometimes arrive early and listen to Prattyush-da practice. It was great to observe his own practice routine and see some of the content he was teaching me put in action. Also, I realised that I have not listened to his instrument that much in the past, so i was really fascinated by what it offered and the resonances and timbre. This being said, it was a new experience to work with an Indian musician from the angle and perspective of another instrument, and that certainly gave me more ideas and opened up the possibilities of how to work with the violin. I also kept my violin and tuning as I play in contemporary settings, which is different from the way the violin is played traditionally in India. This also meant that whatever we were working on would have application to what I could do when I returned to my professional musical life in London. Prattyush-da was versatile and open-minded, and with his own background as a classical artist with studio and arrangement experience, he could work with me from the understanding of where I am professionally and how I may take this material forward. After classes, I often stayed there to discuss musical ideas and learned a lot about the social functions of the music and history. In addition to the music, he has a strong command of theory and history.
I also attended a handful of concerts and festivals that were happening whilst I was there and got to see some amazing musicians of all different instruments perform.
Additionally, with a clear daily routine of yoga first thing and practice all day with breaks for meals + a daily walk to explore the city/ go to a beautiful park in the area, I felt a real sense of peace, calm and finally space and time to reconnect to artistic and personal visions that I feel had gotten pushed to the bottom with all of the other life responsibilities. It was a wonderful feeling to find inspiration and also find good health and balance. It also gave me an opportunity to see the factors that I might need to establish in my day-to-day life in London where possible, ie. routine and repetition, nature, in order to maintain that spaciousness artistically.
I’m grateful for the many amazing opportunities for musical and personal growth that 2022 offered me as well as the continued blossoming of my professional life. I also look ahead to a hopefully quieter and stiller 2023, and now the vibrance of London in Spring and Summer. Wishing you all a happy spring wherever you may be:)
